Mistaken identity - Lewiston man's life turned upside down

LEWISTON - Ronald Wayne Davis lives in Lewiston and he has a big problem. The odds are you, or anyone else you know, has never experienced a problem quite like this.

Davis is 36 years old and discovered in 1991 quite by accident - and much to his dismay - there is another Ronald Wayne Davis living in Michigan. Davis from Lewiston is white and the other Davis is African American, although that has nothing to do with the bureaucratic red tape and frustrations Davis has had to deal with attempting to clear up what has turned out to be a baffling case of mistaken identity.

The other Davis, who is also 36 years old, is incarcerated by the Michigan Dept. of Corrections and shares more than the same name with the Lewiston Davis.

Both men share the same birth date: May 28, 1969. What are the odds of two men with the same name being born on the same day? One in a 100? A thousand?

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But wait, there is more: Somehow, both men ended up with the same Social Security number and, by a strange fluke, only one digit separates their drivers license numbers. What are the odds? One in a million? Astronomical?

The odds of being struck by lightning are 1 in 576,000. The odds of becoming president are 1 in 10 million. A meteor landing on your house is a 1-in-182,138,880,000,000 event.

But the odds of there being two Michigan men named Ronald Wayne Davis and having way too much in common? Those odds are not known but likely are closer to those of having a meteor hit your house.

Davis in Lewiston doesn't care what those odds are; he just wants his life back and doesn't want to share it with someone else.

"Two years ago I tried to collect unemployment but they told me I make too much. How can I make too much if I'm not working?" Davis said, illustrating the types of problems he routinely encounters. In this case he said the unemployment office in Crawford County, where he was living at the time and had filed a claim, had him confused with the other Davis, who was making too much money in Wayne County, resulting in the Lewiston Davis being dubbed ineligible to collect unemployment.

According to Lewiston Davis, his credit is a wreck. He has received numerous tickets and summons to appear in court for nonpayment of those tickets. He wasn't able to get food stamps because he supposedly already had an open case with the Family Independence Agency (FIA).

Davis said it was when he was living in Davisburg on Detroiter Street in 1991 and the other Davis was living in Detroit and coincidentally the numbers of their street addresses were very similar, that he first discovered the amount of personal information he shared with the second Davis.

"I had to fight four tickets in Wayne County and had to miss four days of work because these tickets were sent to the wrong address," said Davis, explaining it was the other Davis who had racked up the tickets. "I finally got that straightened out when the judge in Wayne County told me I wasn't black. Tell me something I don't know.

"I couldn't get a mortgage last year because I was told my credit was bad. I can't get a cell phone," said Davis, who acknowledged he did file for bankruptcy in 1996, a result of a messy divorce. Other than that, he personally has not had any credit problems, he said, even though any financial institutions he has dealt with will tell him differently.

"I'll take credit for any bad credit I legitimately have, but this other stuff that I had nothing to do with, well, I just can't get it taken care of. I feel like I've been walking around for 36 years and don't exist. I can't get anyone to believe me and I just seem to be running around in circles," Davis continued.

Davis said he has waged a fight to get his own Social Security number and to differentiate himself from the other Davis but to no avail. "I've tried Bart Stupak's office. I've gone around and around with a civil rights attorney who works for the state who promised me I would get a new (Social Security) number, but after two-and-a-half years he told me there wasn't anything he could do. I don't know where else to turn."